“I don’t think Trump committed treason with this tweet, but he’s in the neighborhood,” wrote Judd Legum, the editor of ThinkProgress.

Trump said earlier that Putin made a “great move” by choosing not to respond to sanctions leveled by President Barack Obama’s administration this week in retaliation for suspected election-related hacking.

The president-elect’s message was retweeted by the Russian Embassy in the US, a move that poured gasoline on the already controversial tweet.

“What’s the threshold for treason?” wrote DeRay Mckesson, a prominent Black Lives Matter activist who briefly ran as a Baltimore mayoral candidate this year.

The former is run by billionaire Russophobe George Soros and the latter has tried to shut down the free speech and property rights of thousands. MTV is owned by the media conglomerate leviathan Viacom. If an MTV writer had tweeted out a sarcastic remark about Obama’s physical appearance, there is a good chance he would be unemployed right now.

For the next four years, this is the sort of political dialogue we can expect.